Elephant In The Room?

Nothing new to report recently since the snow has disrupted the week so much. Bullish statements from the Senior Management Team early in the week to the effect that the school will weather the storm and remain open whatever the conditions were quickly forgotten: when there are more teachers than students in a school of over a thousand kids there's no point in keeping the place open. So apart from being ticked off by the Principal for throwing snowballs at the few students that did turn up, I have no real news.

It's amazing, though, how little work one accomplishes when not under the cosh.

Here, then, is an anecdote that's been doing the rounds at the school for a while.

The Head of Year 9, Mr S, is a bullish, charismatic, impulsive and unpredictable P.E. teacher who, while his heart is undoubtedly in the right place, is known for speaking without thinking, especially in public. His assemblies are often unintentionally hilarious.

He nearly always picks an entrance song for the students to listen to as they come in and a few years back he asked another teacher to burn him a CD with a song on it. This other teacher duly obliged, but as a joke added another song on the end - Nellie the Elephant.

The students filed in in silence listening to the first track. When nearly all of them were in, Nellie the Elephant came on. Mr S saw this as an opportunity to improvise.

(This isn't word for word. But it could have been.)

Mr S: Calm down, calm down. I know this is Nellie the Elephant, but what can we learn from it? What does this song teach us? I'll tell you what...dreams. It teaches us about dreams. And resilience. It's a song about resilience. Nellie really, really wanted to perform in the circus. It was her dream. And it wasn't easy to get in! So she tried really, really hard. She trained for it and trained for it. And, like the song says, she finally got in to the circus!

So far, so cheesy. Except for one thing:

Nellie the Elephant packed her trunk
And said goodbye to the circus
Off she went with a trumpety-trump
Trump, trump, trump
Nellie the Elephant packed her trunk
And trundled back to the jungle
Off she went with a trumpety-trump
Trump, trump, trump.

(Chorus to Nellie the Elephant)